Bad Girl House

I immediately started being questioned about my romantic past. Right after our first kiss, John was asking me about my experiences with other people. He said that I seemed to know what I was doing, and asked me how many people I had kissed before him. In a normal situation, my past wouldn’t have been a big deal at all. It wasn’t anything monumental or exciting, and I have no doubt that I was way below the curve of a typical nineteen-year-old. With anyone else it may not even have been brought up. Not to mention that it should have been my business, and mine to share if I and when I wanted to. In this situation, I was dealing with irrational jealousy from the very start. A jealousy that made me concerned about what John’s reaction would be to hearing even the most tame of details. I shouldn’t have felt nervous to talk about things that were just part of life. They were the kind of things that everyone experiences. They should have been laughable stories that I could tell while getting to know someone. John made it very plain that he wouldn’t be happy with me if he found out that I was lying to him about anything. Unfortunately, that made my worries even worse. He told me what his reaction would be before I had even said anything.

I felt like I didn’t have a choice but to tell him what he wanted to hear. I was trying to sort out exactly what to do in my mind as quickly as I could. These were people that John was never going to meet, because I didn’t think that I would see them again either. I didn’t think that the questioning would continue after answering him. He would believe me, and this would also be in the past. I told him that I had never kissed anyone but him.

He did believe me, for about a month. That’s when he started pressuring me to have sex with him. He kept hinting that it would be a great birthday present to give him. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to take that step, and it didn’t help when he would laugh about how awkward I acted around him. His talking about sex made me very nervous, and apparently it was impossible for me to hide it from him. He may have even wanted me to feel that way, so he emphasized it. When I finally gave in to him, it was as unromantic as our first kiss had been. It even happened on that same couch in the middle of the day. That event quickly brought back the questions. John thought that I didn’t have enough pain or bleeding for that to have been my first time. It was an absolute truth that that I lost my virginity that day, but I had to continue to tell him that I had never kissed anyone else.

One evening while at John’s apartment, I found a few Playboy magazines under the bathroom sink when I was in search of toilet paper. That bothered me enough to bring it up to him. I felt extremely disrespected to think about him looking at women that I was never going to look like. For someone who was asking for honesty, he didn’t keep up his end of that bargain. He told me that he was hiding them for one of his roommates, and that he wasn’t actually looking at them. Despite this story, he said that it wasn’t a big deal if they were his magazines. Trying to make me feel better, he made one of those haunting statements that whisper in the back of my head.

“I’ll take cute over sexy any day.” That was not a confidence-building statement for a young woman who was just starting to figure out who she was. I didn’t want to be considered just cute. That’s all I felt I had ever been to guys in high school who wouldn’t give me the time of day. I was great friends with some guys in high school, but they never seen me as anything else besides the girl next door. Now even the man I was with saw me as the little girl that I felt like, and not the woman I wanted to be.

John’s questioning was something else that I eventually discussed with my mom. She couldn’t help but point out the fact that John had already been married and had a son when I met him, and he’s asking me about things that I may have done. He also made it no secret that he had been with hundreds of women, beginning at a rather young age. Whether or to that was true, he must have thought that it was impressive to other women. It did make me feel better to hear that what he was doing didn’t make sense, but it was another reminder of the insanity that fueled his reasons for being abusive towards me. He wanted someone who was inexperienced, who was young, but refused to ever believe what I was telling him.